[New Starting Program Spoilers] Faust & Brimstone

[TheocraticalGoblin]

[May contain other very minor spoilers]

 

So these are my first impressions on the newest starting programs, Faust (grants +2 power per turn, but has a 20% chance to install a random daemon each turn) and Brimstone (breaks 1 firewall for 3 pwr, and has passive effect: +10% chance you can reverse-engineer a daemon)

 

These two seem to have been designed to work together, and they may have become one of my new favorite combinations! If you think that you don't want to play with them because daemons, then that's fair, because the deamons sometimes screw you over. Completely. I'm talking about locked Incognita + Labirinth + 800 credits Felix daemon screwover.

But this actually helps you to get used to daemons. You can't keep avoiding daemons forever, because that limits your options even more than not hacking things that have daemons, I've learned. The extra 10% means you sometimes get random boosts to your AP or programs, so that's nice, and you don't have to fear hacking daemons as much.

 

Most daemons aren't even that bad, it's mostly a specific combination that can destroy you. But don't go to Sankaku early with these, if Incognita gets shut down with a mob of angry drones behind you, you're pretty much dead. (Speaking of drones, the new ones are really really cool. And deadly. If your Incognita is geared up though it's easy to go on a massacre )

 

The way I'm playing it in my 120 hour playthrough is with Archived Banks (with the chip to convert consoles into money) and Dr. Xu (so I can can raid all safes without spending power)

The +2 power per turn really has you covered if you spend it wisely. It's of course a must to quickly get more efficient programs (recently I started using rapier, I really like it, and Dagger is one of my favorite programs of all. My most favorite is Data Blast, because epic AoE hacking without cooldown!)

 

[New agent/augment(?) spoilers] Some other thoughts about Prism, I think she would go really well with Rapier, as she gets power when you hack devices, you can pretty much just hack everything for free in alarm level 0-1. I don't really know how Sharp fits, but I think he's just a high risk high reward guy, as having 6 augment slots means he can become this super mega badass all killing guy. (imagine extra AP when attacking, extra AP when becoming invisible, becoming invisible when using a stim pack, extra armor piercing and extra KO damage. And that leaves 1 more augment slot. Just add in Distributed Processing )

 

tl;dr The new programs are cool and you should try them out. Try to combine them with others and tell what you've found.

 

 

 

[WilliamGreywind]

I think one of the best ways to capitalize a Faust + Brimstone style play is to have both Prism and Central. Central especially for her antiviral proxy. Turns the corps greastest strength into a weakness.

[Boar Head]

Yeah I was using this combination and went to Sankaku early on and died tiles away from the elevator due to 2 Elite Enforcers blocking the door. I got some good daemons early on but then I got 2 bad ones in a row, one of which was Labyrinth which is the reason I got screwed completely because I couldn't make it across a room I had come through earlier and then I got alarmed safes (which I kept forgetting about ) and a blowfish which just destroyed any hopes I had of making it...

 

[leonseye]

I think one of the best ways to capitalize a Faust + Brimstone style play is to have both Prism and Central. Central especially for her antiviral proxy. Turns the corps greastest strength into a weakness.

 

I haven't tried out Prism just yet, but I'm really liking Central + Faust + Brimstone.  I went w/ Monst3r at first, thinking he'd be a good credit-making replacement for Xu and Archive Banks (this is my usual setup).

 

However, his bonus is pretty meh in the long run when you can make creds pretty easily, and his gun has WAY too long of a cd for something that only works against humans, imo.  Super cool character though.

 

Thinking that I may go Central + Internationale for her ranged PWR hacking or just take Nika along, as she's my hands-down favorite.  Haven't played w/ her Archive version yet as File Nika is just so damned saxy.

[jimwinsor]

Out of curiosity: If Brimstone's passive effect is +10% chance to daemon reversal, what is the base chance of that happening? Because I have gotten those "green" daemons before, w/o Brimstone ...

[Settemio]

Actually, the more I play with Seed + Brimstone, the more I feel Faust is really more of a gimmick than a gameplan. Let's compare Faust + Brimstone to Seed + Brimstone.

 

Faust triggers a Daemon on average once every five turns. Brimstone gives you a reversal on a relatively small portion of those Daemons, meaning that the majority of them are still going to be bad or at best irrelevant (like Mask or Rubiks after you've already eliminated all the firewalls you care about). So while Brimstone helps mitigate Faust a little bit, Faust's downside is still a downside.

 

Now with Seed + Brimstone, we are still getting the same effect out of Brimstone, in that it makes Daemons overall go more favorably for us. The downside of Faust is not present in Seed at all. And the upside of Faust, that it provides 2 PWR per turn? Well, if you're using Brimstone one or more times per turn, every turn, you're getting better than 2 PWR out of Seed. If you're on average using Brimstone only 2 turns out of every 3, Seed is still even with Faust in terms of PWR gain. And once you start adding other programs, like Oracle, Seed's PWR advantage becomes that much better.

 

The one reason I can think to choose Faust over Seed is if you're doing a lot of stuff with your PWR other than just Incognita programs, and only occasionally using Incognita for hacking. If you want to go Faust + Brimstone + Central, I would add another agent who can actually use all that PWR, like Shalem with the Anatomy Analysis augment, or Nika with a Volt Disruptor III. Flurry Guns also demand a lot of PWR. And be sure to give Central some Buster Chips.

 

Out of curiosity: If Brimstone's passive effect is +10% chance to daemon reversal, what is the base chance of that happening? Because I have gotten those "green" daemons before, w/o Brimstone ...

 

My guess, based purely on a small sample size of my own playthroughs, is that the regular chance is about 5%, or 1-in-20 Daemon reversals, and Brimstone brings it up to about 15%, or 3-in-20. But I would also love to have a more precise answer to this.